Rants

Wednesday, 15 June 2016

The story that was making the rounds yesterday, wherein a purported journalist described in detail his experiences in visiting a gun shop and firing an AR-15, was obviously bogus in many respects. Smell of sulfur? Really? And, while it's been a couple of decades since I fired one of those things, I'm quite certain that the recoil of an AR-15 won't bruise your shoulder no matter how wrongly you hold it. Seriously. The effective recoil is practically in Daisy BB gun territory. His terrifying account was clearly fantasy.

Well, it turns out he was lying about pretty much every other aspect of his visit to the gun shop, too.

Flashback. Early 1990s. One of the columnists for the San Jose Mercury News told of his experience with a group of local shooters. They took him somewhere out in the hills to shoot at a variety of targets, including balls of aluminum foil tossed in the air to be shot at with rifles. When he asked where the bullets were ending up, the guys gave him a blank look.

On the BBS (this was the pre-Internet days) a couple of days later: an account of the same outing as told by one of the shooters. Basically, everything after "some guys took me shooting last week" was a lie. They had in fact taken him to the Los Altos Rod and Gun Club, where there's a range staff, and they're very particular about safety; the shenanigans he described would definitely not have been tolerated there.

When contacted for an explanation of where this bizarre fantasy account had come from, he explained that he'd initially written it up just as it had happened... but the editors had made him change it. Because the honest account didn't fit the paper's official perspective.

In other news, more young people now get their news from social media than from TV. This, presumably, is meant to be a Bad Thing. But, given that newspaper news has been wildly inaccurate (even when not outright dishonest) for decades, and TV news is even worse... maybe this is an improvement? At least there isn't a cartel controlling the content, no matter how hard Facebook and Twitter may try.

Sunday, 16 November 2014

Two related items have grabbed the Internet's attention in the last few days: the foofaraw over a garish shirt, and the attention a curvy young woman attracted while walking through certain areas of New York City.

The catcall video: Surprise! Some lower-class men can be rude, by the standards of the privileged classes. This is of course completely unprecedented; in all other times and places, surely the lower classes were unfailingly polite to their betters.

The shirtstorm: Curiously enough, some creative people don't have the specific set of social skills and conventions-of-the-week to mix well with the modern clerisy. This is absurd, as surely they can take time out from painting masterpieces and landing spaceships on comets to attend finishing school, and the weekly and annual refreshers.

We seem to have acquired a collection of classes - ruling, chattering, and academic - drawn from the wealthy and privileged ranks of society, and completely unaware that anyone outside their bubble even exists - or, when they're forced to notice, their reaction is that such people ought not to exist.

Which brings us to that third item. Building codes certainly serve a good purpose; if I buy or rent a building, or take a job in one, I do want assurance that it's been built to proper standards, and duly inspected and certified as structurally sound and fit for use.

And yet: Many jurisdictions insist that building codes apply to structures that will be occupied solely by the builder, and make violations (including failure to secure the government's blessing) a crime. So, buy a cheap bit of land out of sight of anyone, build a shack from scrounged materials, and live in it alone, without modern amenities, and just for that you become a criminal.

Back when we had that big recall election in California, and anyone with a few bucks and a few dozen acquaintances could run for Governor, I toyed with the idea of running on an Evil Overlord platform. One of the planks was this: I planned to eliminate poverty in California though a system of regressive taxes which would force the poor to move out.

Alas, this notion has now gone mainstream, backed by a submerged version of the sentiment commonly misattributed to Marie Antoinette: "The peasants have no bread? Well, can't they eat cake?"

The ones who make the rules, and who define (with ever-shifting social conventions) Polite Society, simply can't imagine any lifestyle other than their own, let alone anyone wanting to live that way. Homesteaders, hillbillies, carnies, artists (the talented kind, not the rich and famous kind), or even the workmen who keep the cities running but can't afford posh penthouses: those people, if we must notice them at all, are scary!

The same attitude, by the way, is behind the Affordable Care Prevention Act, whereof the premise is that everyone is entitled to, and must have, the sort of comprehensive health plan to which the professional classes have become accustomed, and details of how the lower classes will pay for such a thing are of no consequence.

We must force everyone into the same mold! Full conformity of lifestyle and opinion (apart from certain approved deviations for members of certain approved groups) must be attained!

Because we simply cannot tolerate the presence of Unmutuals in our society.

Wednesday, 17 September 2014

Sometimes, things get set in stone too early, for the wrong reasons... and then, despite the proliferation of libraries-that-do-similar-things in the UN*X world, the old way remains the only way.

My personal peeve here is setting the Baud rate on a serial port. The UN*X way, formalized in the POSIX standard, involves passing the choice of rate as a small integer selected from a list in a header file.

This makes sense in the context of a PDP-11, with a serial-port card that takes a 3-bit number (or whatever it was) to select one output from a Baud-rate generator that does 110 and a few multiples of 300. It's completely outdated in the modern era of UARTs with Baud-rate generators that divide 60 MHz by an arbitrary factor.

And, most of the time, that's OK. But, when you need to talk to an embedded-device UART that runs at 1000 Baud because that's the standard in Upper Whatchacallistan? Having to use Windows just to do that sucks almost as much as writing a special-purpose Linux device driver just to get a custom Baud rate.

(OK, so there is a way of mucking about with the Baud rate using the standard driver. Ugly! Seriously, the API should have been fixed decades ago to take the actual requested Baud rate, with the legacy rate #defines redefined to the actual number, e.g., B9600 would be 9600.)

Sunday, 22 June 2014

OK, so in the ongoingsaga of the Wrong Invoices from Eternal Emperor, I got calmed down enough today to write a letter with perhaps the appropriate tone: more than a little annoyed, organized enough to spell out exactly what I think is going on and what I want done, and not quite annoyed enough, yet, to conjure the family lawyer from his slumbers and make a federal case of it.

And a federal case I believe it could be; Hanlon's Razor only cuts so far, and this is pushing the limits of incompetence. And, really, what kind of accounting software allows a credit for terminating an account retroactive to the beginning of the month, without actually terminating the account? This points to multiple levels of incompetence, at the very least.

Of course, in this age of "the dog ate two years of my e-mails and those of six of my colleagues," is there any limit to the incompetence that can be ascribed to any institution that has no need of competing in the free market?

Seriously: Amazon, still needing to be competitive, seldom makes mistakes - and, in my experience, is quick to correct those few mistakes; you won't need to contact Customer Service twice. But the big institutions? The ones that we're expected to trust with our lives? Fat chance! And the more you learn about them, the less competent they look, all the way down into negative numbers.

And if they can't run a basic accounting system, how good are they at their core business?

Sunday, 19 January 2014

But also - and this applies not just to Google, but to the small number of big-money megacorps that now dominate Silicon Valley:

The oligopsony on tech labor, especially given the non-poaching agreement, keeps wages down.

It also, in combination with the high cost of living and the large amount of non-cash compensation, limits workers' mobility, keeping talent away from innovative and risky self-funded ventures.

The rapid growth of massively-funded, big-spending companies is quickly transforming the local habitat, as low-rent properties are aggressively bulldozed to make way for megacorp campuses and expensive high-density housing for their serfs. The new megacorp buildings are only usable by megacorps, not by little startups.

Factor in the Sand Hill Road venture-capital crowd with its $10 million quantum of funding, and trying to launch a venture, here where the talent is, without massive backing and its attendant filtering, becomes nigh impossible.

And then there's politics: regardless of the individual politics of the executives, the big-money corps throw lots of money at the current ruling party, because that's where the power is. In a high-tax, extreme-regulation state, buying influence is mandatory, and the influx of money from the megacorps reinforces this.

So, yeah. Google is too big, and the big money cartel that now runs this area is vastly too big. Silicon Valley has been broken since the mid-1990s, and is now being aggressively cannibalized into a vast shiny new metropolis where dreams go to die.

OK, so I figure out how to get driving directions, on a route that I like, with a more reasonable time to get there. There's a funny maneuver to get turned around off Tasman and onto Lafayette, and the station's right there.

Well, it is. But there's no place to park for the station on Lafayette, which makes the directions rather less than useful.

And so I get myself turned back around, and coming the other way on Lafayette, and back onto Tasman, and eventually onto that Stars and Stripes thing that actually connects to the station. If I look very closely, there's even a small sign for the train station.

Now, the only actual train-station parking is two handicapped spaces, but there is a modest amount of parking along the road, away from the station. Not a totally unreasonable walking distance for me, but I expect there are plenty of people who don't qualify for the handicapped spaces (which in any case were both full) who'd have trouble, especially if they were carrying luggage. Yeah, I know: you're not supposed to park there. You're supposed to transfer to a bus, which runs on a completely unrelated schedule.

Guys? Trotsky's vision of mass transportation was meant to be liberating. Not cumbersome and constraining.

Oh, and while I was waiting, I looked at the signs. Including the fares. Costs less to drive the Prius, which doubles as local transportation.

But the train did arrive exactly on time, which I guess means Jerry Brown is Mussolini.

Wednesday, 09 October 2013

Just had a call from a phonebot (apparently a meatbot, not the silicon type) wanting to talk at me about the new "health care reform..."

Hold it right there.

It's not reform, goddammit!

The purpose of the ACPA is to prevent reform, and to lock everyone into the crooked third-party payment system while breaking it still further.

You want health-care payment reform? Here are some ideas:

Require that the amount actually paid by a third-party payer, plus the amount paid by the patient, add up to the amount billed by the provider (so long as the amount billed does not exceed a published limit for the service in question).

Start enforcing the laws against price-fixing, conspiracy in restraint of trade, and so on. If these laws have exemptions for "insurance" companies, fix them.

Include government-run third party payers (e.g., Medicare) in both of the above.

Allow formation of group health plans / insurance pools for groups other than companies with full-time employees.

In general, remove the special tax and legal status of employer-provided health plans.

Those are just a few of the obvious ones.

Alas, the Stupid Party will never promote these, as it's almost as locked to Big Finance as the Evil Party.

Yes, the terrorists hate me - not personally, but as part of a group that is Not Of Their Tribe. They certainly want to kill people like me. Heck, it's possible one might stumble across one of the more terrorist-disrespectin' posts on my blog and start hating me personally.

But! Their demonstrated capability is to kill perhaps dozens of people at a time, once in a while, getting up into the low thousands on the rare occasion when a grand plot comes together. (I expect I could run up a bigger body count single-handed, were I so inclined. Fortunately for all concerned, that's contrary to my nature. Quoth a military acquaintance: "I'm glad you're on our side. You are on our side, aren't you?") The likelihood of J. Random American becoming a victim of terrorism is almost laughable.

The government, meanwhile, has a demonstrated capability for wreaking destruction on a massive scale; has a history of rounding up its own people; has vast surveillance systems in place; and has taken on a life of its own.

“THIS is the State above the Law. The State exists for the State alone.”
[This is a gland at the back of the jaw, And an answering lump by the collar-bone.] - Kipling

Further: those currently in power in D.C. and Sacramento hate me - not personally, but as part of a group that is Not Of Their Tribe. They may not specifically plan to kill me, but they make no bones about their intention to put People Like Me in our place, with edicts backed ultimately by deadly force. And, should any of the myriad officials in either of those places be offended by one of my blog posts... well, there are so many laws and regulations that I'm almost certainly in violation of something or other. Oh, look! I have a pipe nipple, and a bag of sugar, and my Internet history shows I looked up a popular al-Qaeda publication back in April. That adds up to possessing an item and a substance with intent to construct a destructive device, no?

So, yes: the government is a vastly greater threat than the terrorists.

And furthermore: much of the damage associated with terrorism is actually caused by government overreaction, which creates large and persistent drains on the economy and destroys trust within society.

Look, an occasional bee sting won't kill you. Even a dozen bee stings in close succession won't kill you. But! If your immune system overreacts to the bee stings... your own immune system can kill you in response to a single sting.

And that, folks, is what's happening to our society. Our immune system - those functions of government set up to defend our society against threats - is instead destroying society through a series of massive and escalating overreactions over the past few decades. Whether the threat is drugs, guns, the Mafia, or terrorists... the reaction is disproportionate, destructive, and never scaled back.

Monday, 21 January 2013

A grandly expensive celebration of four more years of unbridled looting and crony corporatism?

This from the same crowd that was all upset about Mittens having a big fancy house that he paid for with his own money?

Yeah. Money you earn in the private sector is dirty money. Money that's taken from the private sector at gunpoint and handed out by the ruling class is virtuous money.

And, you know, our masters deserve their luxurious lifestyle, because they work so hard, like, 5 hours a day, 100 days a year or something for a six-figure pittance of a salary, so we can hardly begrudge them a few perks of office, right?

And, we must always remember, some animals are more equal than others.

Thursday, 18 October 2012

As the momentum shifts from Zaphod Hussein "Somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, a planet is missing its idiot" Beeblebrox to Mittens "Crazy rat guy" Romney, and Zaphod amps up the class-warfare rhetoric while continue to shower future taxpayers' money on super-rich supporters, and Mittens shows no public sign of actually understanding how this is a bad thing....

I ponder the totally-over-the-top, foaming-at-the-mouth political rants that I've been too upset to type up and post lately, regarding crony corporatism, tax farming, and the sale of the working class into serfdom, and I think:

It would be really easy to word one of these rants such that the reader would have great difficulty in determining whether the perspective was Libertarian or Communist.

Because, while Libertarianism and Communism are almost perfectly opposite, the system we have now is, somehow, almost perfectly opposite to both of them.

(Well, in principle, anyway. What we have now looks remarkably similar to Communism-as-practiced.)

Wednesday, 01 August 2012

A small-businessman of my acquaintance (no, not me) recently spent a couple of days on the phone with sundry representatives of a bank which, on advice of my parrot, I will not name, but refer to only as "Hell's Cargo."

SB has personal checking and credit-card accounts, and business checking and credit-card accounts, with HC.

The adventure began when he attempted to use HC's on-line banking system to transfer funds from business checking to business credit card. (Apparently the business credit card is more of a debit card, or a prepaid credit card, or some such deal. My own business credit card is a real credit card, but then I'm not dealing with Hell's Cargo.)

He set things up, and clicked the magic button. The specified funds promptly evaporated from business checking, but, a few minutes later, had not materialized in business credit card.

Well, oops. He'd selected the wrong destination, and moved the funds to his personal credit card account instead. Except... that account hadn't been credited yet, either.

And so, SB called HC, and found himself conversing with an array of HC Customer Service Representatives. As I understand it, the multi-day conversation went something like this:

SB: Hi. I accidentally transferred some funds from my business checking account to my personal credit card account, and I need to get the money into my business credit card account so I can place an order before the noon cutoff.

CSR1: And it will take one to three days to arrive at your credit card account.

SB: How's that?

CSR2: Sir, the funds were promptly loaded into an armored car in Wells, Maine.

CSR3: And are en route to your credit card account in Mitchell, South Dakota.

CSR1: When the armored car arrives and the funds are verified, your account will be credited.

SB: I'm on a deadline here. Can we just change the destination from personal credit card to business credit card?

CSR4: It will take one to three days to arrive at your credit card account.

SB: Can we cancel the transfer and start over?

CSR5: Sir, the funds are already on the armored car.

CSR4: Your personal credit card account will be credited in one to three days.

CSR1: After which, we can reverse the transfer.

CSR3: And the funds will be returned to your checking account in one to three days.

CSR2: After which, you can transfer the funds to your business credit card account.

CSR6: Which will take one to three days.

All of which is just great for a small business. Hey, the company's entire supply of working capital is going for a ride on the Gordian roller-coaster, so SB might as well just take the rest of the week off, right?

And I have to wonder how HC gets away with helping itself to use of its customers' money during the 1-3 days it takes to process an intra-bank transfer. (No, I don't really wonder. It's called "regulatory capture.")

Thursday, 03 May 2012

If the facts are as represented, DEA agents stuck a suspect - maybe not even a suspect - in a cell with no water nor toilet, and simply forgot about him for five days.

There's a lawsuit in the works, but that's stupid. Those agents need to be in freaking prison, for the rest of their freaking lives. We're talking grossly - even grotesquely - negligent near-homicide here.

But here's the serious WTF, that hit me a few hours after seeing the story:

How is it even possible to forget that a cell contains a prisoner? Consulting my vast expertise in formal detention facilities (TV, movies, historical tours, and having turned down an opportunity to stay in the local police department's holding cell), I notice something about cells: they got no privacy. Old style, they got bars like old-school zoo cages. New style, they maybe have a wall or two made of clear (easy-clean, spit- and poo-flinging-proof) polycarbonate. Point being, anyone who walks by can't possibly help seeing that the cell is occupied.

Yes, I've heard of cells with solid, opaque doors. They're in the Imperial Dungeon on Planet Mongo, and they're meant for tossing prisoners into and forgetting about them.

So: was Daniel Chong locked up in an escape-proof broom closet instead of an actual cell, or does the DEA office in San Diego contain a portal to Planet Mongo?

Does the U.S. government really have cells suited for tossing prisoners in and forgetting them?

Friday, 06 April 2012

Most parts of the world - the industrialized parts, anyway - you want to sell an electronic doohickey to the general public, it needs the local flavor of EMI testing, to ensure that it won't interfere with other electronic doohickies - TV sets, cellphones, police radios, clocks, pacemakers, microwave ovens, whatever.

Requires? Really? I can see requiring EMC certification for, oh, medical equipment, avionics, control systems for nuclear power plants, and anything the government is buying... but this seems like it's going way overboard with consumer protection, if indeed it's even meant to be consumer protection. Seems like voluntary certification would be plenty good enough for consumer products... never mind a single-board computer that isn't meant to be a mass-market item in its own right.

Your nanny state @ work: protecting you from the heartbreak of cheap gadgets that don't always work right.

Wednesday, 07 March 2012

And yet: while it's a product that shouldn't exist, it's also a product that's long been needed.

Because some nitwit, long ago, decided that the Inter-IC Bus would be an excellent choice for handling configuration and supervisory activity on backplanes and across modules. In electrically noisy environments. Despite its complete lack of noise immunity, incompatibility with galvanic isolation, and general unsuitability for running more than a few inches.

And, somehow, it became a telco industry standard for that sort of thing.

So, for those stuck with misusing I2C is noisy or hot-plugged applications, there's now a chip to make your life tolerable.

And, for those trying to communicate among modules in noisy environments, and not constrained by the stupid decisions of decades gone by: might I suggest RS-485, or CANbus?

Tuesday, 06 March 2012

One of the things I really like about Digi-Key's web site is the ability to do a parametric search.

Amazon is still, notably, lacking this.

I'm sort of toying with replacing my DVD player (which seems to be going flakey), and the existence of blurray players with network features for under $100 caught my eye. Gee, there's one from LG that has an Ethernet connector (which saves trying to enter a 64-hex-digit random WPA key), and component video out (I have no intention of replacing my projector with an HDMI model until it needs replacement). Hmmm....

But wait! It supports Netflix, YouTube, and a couple of others... but not, apparently, Amazon video-on-demand (nor files on the local network). And way to filter these things by on-line services supported? No. By network connection type? No. By video output connectors available? No.

Eventually I find the list of devices that support AmVOD. Minimal description, if any, given in the list. Have to click through to the product pages... which tend to be highly uninformative about what connectors are provided. And the first though I look at have purty pictures of the front of the unit and the remote control... but none of the back of the unit, where the information is. I want my connector pr0n!

Oh, and some of them have both Ethernet and WiFi... with cryptic words implying that the Ethernet is for some special purposes only, not for the Internet features. How's that again?

Oh, well: back to Plan A, i.e., take no action until further notice.

Update: it appears that the living-room computer, which serves as the alternative DVD player (actually, the primary DVD player, until the pause button on the remote stopped working), has eaten yet another DVD-ROM drive. Surely I have another PATA DVD drive somewhere....

Saturday, 03 March 2012

I'd noted a few years back that Apple, Microsoft, and the KDE team had gotten into a three-way suck race, busily adding shininess to the UI while decreasing actual usability.

Well, KDE seems to be out of that race, having gotten decently usable again (albeit still not back to what it once was, and particularly lacking in, e.g., the printer/queue management app).

But fear not! Ubuntu seems determined to press on with the new "everything's a tablet" UI, so you'll have the small number of big shiny icons plastered across your 10" touchscreen... even if you have a 26" monitor and no touchscreen. Master menu? Taskbar? Multiple desktops? Naw, you don't want those; they totally don't work on a 10" tablet!

And! Not only has Apple been making its desktop UI more and more tablet/cellphone-ish, but now it seems Microsoft has gotten into the game! Yes, Windows 8 now forces all your desktop stuff into a cellphone-oriented UI!

So, we're back to a three-way suck race.

Excuse, please: while I often wish my cellphone were more like a real computer (e.g., any time I'm typing, let alone trying to do a select or a cut'n'paste), I've never once wished my computer had a more cellphone-like interface!

TV screens distorted: well, maybe, if it's a strong field and you have an old CRT TV. Flatscreen, no way.

Interference with cordless phones: bullshit. There's just no freakin' way a static magnetic field will interfere with a cordless phone... unless it's strong enough to pick the thing up by its steel parts.

Hard drives corrupted: just how strong is the field we're talking about, here? Strong enough to pick up hammers? 'Cause a field that'll mess with the data on a disk platter is going to have some pretty dang obvious effects on any ferrous objects in the vicinity.

I say the plaintiffs are flat-out lying about these purported effects, and diffidently suggest that the actual field strength inside their living space due to the magnetized joists is less than the Earth's natural magnetic field. Easy test: walk through the house with a compass. Does it mostly point somewhere near north? You don't have an alarmingly strong artificial field.

Most likely they've fallen under the influence of some snake-oil peddler who detected feeble fields in the vicinity of the joists and has now convinced them that their lives are in danger, so they're making up unlikely or impossible phenomena, which the courts have so far failed to recognize as such.

Monday, 03 October 2011

El Reg reports that Adobe spends much effort on Acrobelfry security updates ensuring that they won't crash end users' systems:

The last thing we want to do is ship a release that blue screens hundreds of millions of machines.

Er.

The ability of Acrobat Reader to do that sort of thing has bothered me for many years. Why the smeg does a freaking document reader need the sort of privileges that allow blue-screening a computer, being a conduit for malware, and so forth? And why should an update to a document reader require a reboot?

Really, now: what privileges does a document reader need, anyway? Display graphics, read files, save files, and print, right? Same as any mundane app? So how come it gets all hooked into the OS? Is this because of yet another inadequacy in Windows, or is it just psychotic app design?

And, Adobe: as long as I'm ranting, here's one of my favorites: fix the stupid Postscript printing, will ya? I'm currently on Linux, with a printer that speaks BR-script, but I've also seen this on Windows with a printer that spoke genuine Adobe Postscript: for some PDF documents, Acrobat, on printing to a Postscript printer, will produce totally b0rked Postscript, causing the printer to barf with a syntax error, stack overflow, or similar, sometimes immediately and sometimes after a few pages. Alternative PDF viewers will generally print the same document, to the same printer, just fine. The problem's been there for at least a decade; it's like nobody at Adobe even cares about Postscript any more.